How is it that a 150-year-old, 400,000 employee industrial conglomerate is competing and winning in the rapidly involving IoT software industry? We’ve just published a case study in which Bosch shares how open collaboration at the Eclipse Foundation factors into that success. This case study is required reading for any organization considering pursuing an open source strategy.
This case study is yet another proof point that open source has won. No single company can deliver innovation at the pace and scale of open source. For industrial companies in particular, broadly adopted open technologies and standards are critical for success in the digital economy. It’s a case of disrupt or be disrupted — and open source holds the key for rapid and sustainable innovation in the digital age. The team at Bosch recognized all of this several years ago. When the time came for creating an IoT platform for themselves and their customers, Bosch chose open source to compete with proprietary vendors.
At the Eclipse Foundation, Bosch is successfully executing a long-term strategy to create a widely adopted open source platform for IoT. Having previously been a long-term Solutions member of the Eclipse Foundation, Bosch increased its membership level in the Eclipse Foundation to become a Strategic member and joined the Eclipse IoT Working Group in 2015. Beyond IoT, Bosch is an active participant in the Eclipse Foundation’s Automotive Industry community.
Some of the highlights from the case study (html) (pdf):
- Bosch’s leadership in the Eclipse IoT community has helped position the company as a leader in the IoT industry.
- Bosch has created six different IoT open source projects since joining the Eclipse IoT community. In addition, Bosch contributes to many other Eclipse IoT projects.
- Bosch has contributed around 1.5 million lines of code to Eclipse projects. At present, over 60 Bosch developers work on Eclipse IoT projects.
- Many of the Bosch IoT Suite commercial products are now based on Eclipse IoT projects. The open development process used by the Eclipse projects has been adopted by Bosch Software Innovations’ product development teams. The open source development model helps Bosch provide more transparency for their customers, and aids in recruiting new developers keen to work on open source.
- The Eclipse Foundation’s clear, vendor-neutral rules for intellectual property sharing and decision-making make it easy to collaborate with other organizations on driving rapid innovation. The Foundation’s legal processes provide Bosch with the legal assurance that they can successfully embed open source technology into their commercial products.
We are thrilled that Bosch is seeing the benefits of their open source strategy and participation in the Eclipse community. Thanks to the contributions of Bosch engineers and many other developers within the Eclipse community, all can benefit from runtimes and frameworks creating a open, vendor-neutral platform for IoT.
To learn more about the Eclipse IoT community, head over to the Eclipse IoT Working Group website.
